Mothers of Massive Resistance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gillespie McRae
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
School Choice ◽  
White Women ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Massive Resistance ◽  
White Mothers ◽  
Brown Decision ◽  
National Networks

Examining racial segregation from 1920s to the 1970s, this book argues that white segregationist women constituted the grassroots workforce for racial segregation. For decades, they censored textbooks, campaigned against the United Nations, denied marriage certificates, celebrated school choice, and lobbied elected officials. They trained generations, built national networks, collapsed their duties as white mothers with those of citizenship, and experimented with a color-blind political discourse. Their work beyond legislative halls empowered the Jim Crow order with a flexibility and a kind of staying power. With white women at the center of the story, massive resistance and the rise of postwar conservatism rises out of white women’s grassroots work in homes, schools, political parties, and culture. Their efforts began before World War II and the Brown Decision and persisted past the removal of “white only” signs in 1964 and through the anti-busing protests. White women’s segregationist politics involved foreign affairs, economic policy, family values, strict constitutionalism, states’ rights, and white supremacy. It stretched across the nation and overlapped with and helped shape the rise of the New Right. In the end, this history compels us to confront the reign of racial segregation as a national story. It asks us to reconsider who sustained the Jim Crow order, who bears responsibility for the persistence of the nation’s inequities, and what it will take to make good on the nation’s promise of equality.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gillespie McRae
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Women ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Elected Officials ◽  
World War ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Massive Resistance

Massive resistance to the civil rights movement has often been presented as sequestered in the South, limited to the decade between the Brown Decision and the Civil Rights Act, and attributed to the most vehement elected officials and the Citizens’ Councils. But that version ignores the long-standing work of white women who sustained racial segregation and nurtured both massive support for the Jim Crow order in the interwar period and who transformed support into massive resistance after World War II. Support for the segregated state existed among everyday people. Maintaining racial segregation was not solely or even primarily the work of elected officials. Its adherents sustained the system with quotidian work, and on the ground, it was often white women who shaped and sustained white supremacist politics.

The New National Face of Segregation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gillespie McRae
Keyword(s):  
School Choice ◽  
White Women ◽  
Property Values ◽  
Racial Integration ◽  
Parental Authority ◽  
New Right ◽  
The Political ◽  
Massive Resistance ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
White Mothers

The conclusion addresses the urban North, exposing the political similarities between the most committed segregationists and those white women who protested busing in the 1970s. It argues that anti-busing activists should be considered segregationists and that massive resistance should be extended into anti-busing protests. Most Americans, including supporters of Brown, resisted this government intrusion into parental authority, property values, and school choice. As southern segregationists had predicted, when racial integration threatened to reorder the daily lives of northern white communities, they would react much like the South’s segregationists. Women’s organizations in Boston looked south for models of resistance and worked for various iterations of racially separated schools. Boston’s Louise Day Hicks and ROAR reacted much like white mothers in the South. Across the nation, law made busing a reality, while white women’s opposition on the ground eroded the power of its implementation and solidified the rise of the New Right.

Threats Within

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gillespie McRae
Keyword(s):  
Racial Identity ◽  
School Choice ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Black Children ◽  
Parental Authority ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Massive Resistance ◽  
The Family ◽  
Maternal Concern

White segregationist women nationwide believed that the Brown decision threatened their private, public, and political authority. Long committed to the Jim Crow order, they emerged as the mass in massive resistance. They painted the family as the center of political life, with parental authority eroded by a federal government. Because school integration eroded their ability to secure the benefits of white supremacy for their children, it compromised their ability to be good mothers. They called for school choice, lobbied for local choice plans, and worked for the white Citizens’ Councils. At times their political language minimized racial identity and replaced it with a particular gender identity, prioritizing motherhood and burying whiteness and offering a color-blind discourse for a national audience. But Brown also put black children at the forefront of the movement, forcing white segregationist women to cast aside a language of maternal concern for one that degraded black schoolchildren.

White Women, White Youth, and the Hope of the Nation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gillespie McRae
Keyword(s):  
School Choice ◽  
White Women ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
New Right ◽  
White Youth ◽  
Limited Government ◽  
Central High School ◽  
National Organizations ◽  
Ole Miss

After Brown, white segregationist women build national organizations and were devoted to making white youth political activists and future purveyors of white supremacy. As the legal support for segregation diminished, the Jim Crow order remade itself. While moderates directed the implementation of integration, southern segregationist women continued to work in various ways and with national political constituencies to secure resistance to racial equality and to meaningful integration. They continued their efforts for racial segregation after the forced federal integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, and of Ole Miss. As white segregationists focused on training white youth for the next iteration of white supremacist politics, they gradually amplified their color-blind political rhetoric. They built organizations like the Women for Constitutional Government and Patriotic American Youth that emphasized limited government, anti-communism, and school choice and opposition to decolonization, joining conservatives and segregationists nationwide to shape the New Right.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry Gershenhorn
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Educational Opportunity ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Voter Registration ◽  
Equal Educational Opportunity ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Era

During the twentieth century, black journalists played an essential role in the struggle for equal rights in America. Operating in the racially oppressive South, determined black publishers, editors, and journalists illuminated racial discrimination, while advocating black voter registration and equal educational opportunity. Austin, who edited and published the Carolina Times from 1927 to 1971, was one of the most fearless and effective of these journalists. He boldly challenged white supremacy and racial segregation for over four decades, from the years prior to World War II through the modern civil rights era.

Jim Crow in Uniform

2021 ◽  
pp. 211-259
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Guglielmo
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Military Officers ◽  
World War ◽  
Military Leaders ◽  
White House ◽  
Military Life ◽  
At Home

Chapter 6 examines the military’s black-white boundaries in the context of troops’ training and stateside service during World War II. These boundaries, the handiwork above all of military officers and leaders, wended their way through nearly every aspect of military life, creating a dense and powerful structure of white domination and black subordination—or in the words of one wartime commentator, “Jim Crow in Uniform.” In the eyes of its creators, this version of Jim Crow was necessary both to win a war for freedom overseas and to shore up faltering white supremacy at home, faltering in part because of the military’s own unwitting actions. As with its civilian cousin, Jim Crow in uniform generated extensive protest, which managed to blur a small but important number of black-white lines. The number would have been higher had protesters not faced formidable opposition in the White House, in Congress, in the courts, and among military leaders.

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